Poetry & Performance Anxiety with Annie P. Quigley

I had the immense pleasure of speaking with fellow writer, poet, and editor Annie P. Quigley for my monthly newsletter, The Scoop. We discussed stage fright, her poetry manuscript, and the ice cream flavor she’d be most likely to write a poem about. Read our full, unedited conversation below.

Q: I understand that you have a poetry manuscript in the works—how exciting! Is there anything you can/would like to share about it?

A: I do! It’s a very salt-laden book that thinks about family myth, sisterhood, tidepools, and the impossibility of keeping even what is most tender. During the pandemic I was part of a two-year program helmed by the stellar poet Angel Nafis. Angel had us sieve through our work to find recurring words and images to uncover a bigger collection, sort of like looking at the night sky to find constellations rather than pushing the stars around. She asked us: What can you not stop writing about? Where do you see it? What does it know?

For me, the thing that permeated every poem was the salt molecules in the air. Living in Maine, the salt air is always there, and my poems sort of lived and breathed within all the fog and brininess. But the salt air is also uncatchable—it can’t be bottled or grasped or kept. There’s something so mournful to me about it. I realized it felt to me like a portal, a witness: to lost people, lost childhood, and particularly two women, my grandmothers, who kept reappearing as I wrote. One was a practical do-it-yourself New Englander who told me as a child that the salt air could heal, even though it didn’t prevent her own enormous loss as a young mother. The other was a woman I’m named for, who died suddenly one year before I was born. I think in writing I am trying to pin down these things, to keep them, to look at them closer—but of course even writing can’t keep the thing itself.

Q: Do you (or did you) ever grapple with “stage fright” while writing and/or performing poetry? If so, what tips/tricks can you share for working through it?

A: The thing I struggle with most is not reading my work but sharing it with those closest to me. I hold my poems tight while I’m working on them, because I feel in intimate conversation with them. There’s a sacredness about the process of writing, and for me that bubble gets popped when I share it too early. For a long time I’ve had a rule with my family and friends like, you can read this when it gets published! It’s been a good goal for me to keep submitting to journals, but also a way to keep a kind of rigorousness and seriousness about my work for myself.

However! I got all these rejections, and I never thought about what would happen when something did get published. I got an email that one of my poems was going to be included in the Best New Poets 2023 anthology, and I was thrilled, and then a second later I was like: shit. People are going to read this?! On top of that, this particular poem felt like the most raw poem in the manuscript. It dealt with some truths I’ve been grappling with in the last few years about what happened to my dad’s mom at the end of her life. I was freaked out. Would my family be angry? Or hurt? What right did I have to tell this story, when I wasn’t yet alive to live through it myself?

I imagine I’m not alone in this fear of writing about people you love and wanting to do so with care. Three things helped me in the weeks leading up to the publication, when I was panicking. First I told my partner and my sister, who is also a writer, that I wanted to contact the editors (!) and retract some parts of the poem (!!), or all of it. They both pointed out how ridiculous that was. I described to my therapist how scared I was to have my family read it, who listened, then paused and said, It must be a good poem. And then it was out, and the grace with which my family read it—particularly my dad—not only affirmed that they were the best, which I knew, it also opened up conversations we’d never had about my grandmother. All to say: I don’t know that I have an answer about how to push through this, except to say that it’s terrifying, and maybe that means you’re saying something you need to say.

Q: This newsletter, as you know, has an ice cream sub theme. If you were ever to write a poem about ice cream, which flavor (or shop, or experience) would you write about and why?

A: My first thought is mint chip, because I don’t think I could make it long without mint chip ice cream, specifically the Trader Joe’s variety. But if we’re going for a poetic sense, it would have to be vanilla. Vanilla gets a bad rap for being boring, but it’s quietly complex. As a kid, there was a summer my sister, my parents, my grandmother and I would go to Dairy Queen for ice cream after dinner—sometimes for dinner. I’d get a vanilla soft serve in a dish with rainbow sprinkles. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, was living with us at the time, one of the last summers of her life, and she took a real emphatic delight in sweets and other delectable things, like I do. I was about five or six and had a change purse full of pennies, but we’d bicker over who would treat. She usually won. I have a poem about this memory—and one about drinking root beer floats from plastic cups the first night in what would become our family’s home, which, incidentally, we’re in the process of letting go of. Oof, see, that’s the thing. Writing poems, an everyday image or word is never far away from a gut-punch like that.